Specialized: A Stuyvesant Teacher Speaks Out

The past, present, and future of Stuyvesant High School

Written by an anonymous Stuyvesant High School teacher.

The story of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School is a story about changing public perceptions of excellence in education. For decades, Stuyvesant has offered extraordinary educational opportunities to the students who pass its objective, standardized admissions test, yet it remains completely free of tuition. On account of its exceptionally bright students, the competitive spirit they instill in each other, and the rigorous standards to which they are held, Stuyvesant has produced four Nobel Laureates, numerous prize-winning scientists, and countless luminary alumni. Yet in recent decades, perceptions of Stuyvesant’s mission and admissions have soured. Prioritizing performance has fallen out of vogue, and the school has faced mounting political pressure to relax or even eliminate its competitive admissions test for the purpose of racial parity. As admissions standards have been loosened, students have suffered—both the accelerated students, whose opportunities are being limited by the need for faculty to cater to students who arrived unprepared, and the unprepared students themselves, who fall ever further behind. Stuyvesant demonstrates that the commitment to competitive admissions and demanding expectations are not incidental to academic achievement but foundational. It also, sadly, demonstrates the remarkable challenges now facing the schools that still deem excellence worth celebrating.

Special Beginnings

Stuyvesant High School officially opened in 1904 as the flower of a growing national interest in public schools aimed at “manual training.” While the concept of manual training included the teaching of skilled trades, New York City superintendent William H. Maxwell’s conception was expansive and ambitious. In Maxwell’s vision, a manual training high school was not only “the best preparation for life” for the future craftsperson, but “the keenness of observation, deftness of hand, and mental ingenuity developed by work of the manual training high school constitute the best possible preparation for entrance to a medical school or one of the great scientific schools.” From the very beginning, Maxwell, an Irish immigrant himself, imagined Stuyvesant as a ticket for poor and immigrant students into prosperous careers, so long as they could seize the opportunity.

While it would still be three years before construction finished on its new building at East 15th Street, the school was so beset by new enrollees that it needed two annexes at the new site to house them all. After its grand opening, The New York Times ran a glowing endorsement of the project:

“With the same care and circumspection that a chemist exercises in studying a new element, the educators have planned this institution. … New York has provided a school which excels anything of a similar nature in the country. … [O]wing to their superior training, they [the graduates of Stuyvesant] will make their influence felt, and will contribute liberally to the prosperity of the nation.”

Already, the paper of record was taking pride in Stuyvesant’s students, whose “superior training” would soon increase the “prosperity” of the whole country.

Following the arrival in 1908 of a new principal, the eminent physicist Dr. Ernest von Nardoff, Stuyvesant began to champion a new curriculum of intensive math and science. The sense of purpose was becoming more palpable by the day, and Stuyvesant students were beginning to stand out. Already in 1909, an estimated 84% of Stuyvesant graduates were proceeding to college, while other manual training schools were sending fewer than half. The yearbook editor in 1911 would perfectly crystallize the optimistic atmosphere pervading the new school, writing that “Stuyvesant High School has a mission to perform in this city…. For the elementary school graduate who is of a mechanical, mathematical, or scientific mind, the Stuyvesant High School is truly ‘The Door of Opportunity.”

And how many students would knock on that door! Now with even stronger allure, pupils from all over the city flocked to ‘Stuy’ to learn, and by 1920 Dr. Nardoff had placed the school on double session to accommodate them. Stuyvesant soon established a reputation as one of New York City’s finest high schools, and from 1920 began offering admission only to those students with the sterling academic records to match. The impressive high school continued in the interwar years to introduce more new courses in math and science, and to educate more classes of talented, driven young people. Finally in 1934, Stuyvesant began using a standardized admissions exam to select the brightest and best-prepared minds from the ever-growing number of interested students.

For striving New York City youth of all classes, regardless of their country of origin or family name, Stuyvesant was a powerful center of opportunity—especially because it came without a price tag. But Stuyvesant was not the only beacon for young minds in New York. Townsend Harris High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, and the Bronx High School of Science were likewise exceedingly difficult and held their students to the highest academic standards. The curriculums at these competitive schools emphasized mastery of math and science, and legions of stories depict the iron rigor demanded from their students. With high standards came an intense workload, and not just any pupil could keep up. Strong students by the usual metrics regularly found themselves to be just average at these incubators of excellence. One student worked so hard that he could barely get four hours of sleep a night and yet would see his classmates “racing through their homework during the lunch hour.” However, the frenzied clip of assignments and the ubiquity of stronger peers instilled a fraternal competitive ethos that motivated students to push each other even further. For those who could manage the accelerated pace, the work more than paid off. Thanks to selective admissions and high expectations, the students at these specialized schools were leading the nation in scholarships and awards, and excellence was prized as these schools’ guiding mission.

Fragile Beacons

Excellence was ubiquitous in these New York gems, but the city quickly learned how fragile such cultures of achievement were. Citing strains of a wartime budget, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia determined that Townsend Harris, a standout institution even among the specialized schools, was not a public priority and would have to face the ax.

The New York Times came out strongly in opposition to La Guardia’s decision, taking a stance that the paper’s readers today would surely find taboo:

“The most widely admitted defect in our school system is that the gifted are frequently held back by the dullards. Townsend Harris is the one high school in the city where this obstacle is not permitted to arise. To abandon the educational ideal which it embodies would be a regrettable step, limiting opportunity for gifted children of the future.”¹

While perhaps surprising to the contemporary subscriber, the sentiment of the Times was not unusual. Such a position was wholly consistent with its celebration in 1907 of Stuyvesant as “a school which excels” its influences and provides “superior training” of which the city should be proud. Throughout this period, the Times was perfectly amenable to seeing excellence as the goal of education. It would not be until many years later that we would see this sentiment fade.

In a desperate outcry against La Guardia’s actions, students rallied to save the school, calling a sit-in of over 850 people during the Easter vacation of 1941. But despite the motions of the Borough Presidents of the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island (then “Richmond”), and Queens, the Board of Estimates refused to modify La Guardia’s decision. The final vote was 9-7 in favor of the closure, and the 97th anniversary of Townsend Harris marked its last. The school would lie dormant until it reopened on the campus of Queens College in 1984.²

The other three specialized schools–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science–managed to survive unchallenged until a wave of disturbances hit the city in the late 1960s. In September of 1968, as tensions about school segregation reached a boiling point in New York City, frustrated protestors from the heavily minority and impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district of Brooklyn rose up and demanded the removal of various teachers whom they deemed incompetent. The protestors were backed by the legitimacy and money of the Ford Foundation, and eventually Mayor John V. Lindsay sided with them, forcing the Board of Education to hand off increasing control of the school system to local community boards.³

Soon the entire city school system was controlled by community boards composed of local parents. By 1970, Vermont educator and decentralization specialist Dr. Harvey Scribner was appointed to lead the system in the newly created position of Schools Chancellor. Under the new regime, it was not long before the specialized schools fell under scrutiny.

Forged by Fire: The Birth of the SHSAT

On January 21, 1971, Alfredo Mathew, the first Puerto Rican Superintendent in New York City history and a man who owed his rise to decentralization, accused Bronx Science (and, by extension the other specialized schools) of using the admissions test to deliberately screen out minorities and create segregated schools. Figure 1 provides the ethnic breakdown of the specialized schools in 1971 as seen through the eyes of the Times. Mathew was appalled at the difference between the share of Black and Puerto Rican students at Bronx Science–9.7% and 3.9% respectively–and their share in the city’s public high schools generally–29.5% and 15.1%.

Figure 1: Ethnic Rolls in Special Schools (March 1971)

Mathew and his community board urged Chancellor Scribner to abolish the admissions test,⁴ and by February 23, 1971, Scribner had convened a panel to scrutinize the exam. Although Scribner found that the admissions exam did indeed test for the advanced skills that were crucial for success at the specialized schools, he sowed dissent with his suspicion that “any test of achievement tends to be culturally biased.”⁵

Mathew’s attacks provoked a furious reaction from the students and principals of all the specialized schools, who came before the New York State Legislature and invoked the name of the fallen Townsend Harris. In their defense, two Bronx legislators, Republican Senator John D. Calandra and Democratic Assemblyman Burton G. Hecht, sponsored a bill that would make a uniform, competitive admissions test the only criterion for entry into the specialized schools. No other considerations – not donations, not recommendations by powerful relatives, not politically motivated statistical manipulation – would interfere with objective, selective admissions based on aptitude alone.

Distressed, the New York City Board of Education called on the legislature to vote down the Hecht-Calandra bill, stating that “[i]t would be most unfortunate for legislation to be enacted on matters of educational policy and administration that should be decided by officials of the school system.”⁶ But despite the Board’s objections, the bill passed the State Assembly and saved selective admissions at the specialized schools.

The New York Times encouraged the Senate to scuttle the measure. In an editorial entitled “Petrifying the High Schools?” contradicting their 1940’s stance, the Times noted of the specialized schools that “neither their admissions process nor their curriculum is sacrosanct. Enactment of the bill by the State Senate would be a flagrant violation of educational home rule.”⁷ But enact it they did, and the Hecht-Calandra Act came into effect that year. The Act specifically stated that:

Admissions to the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School and Brooklyn Technical High School and such similar further special high schools which may be established shall be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open in the eighth or ninth year of study, in accordance with the rules promulgated by the N.Y.C. Board of Education, without regard to any school district wherein the child may reside.⁸

As a result of the Hecht-Calandra Act, the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) was formally established as the sole mechanism for entry into Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. By the time the Scribner panel eventually did call for the removal of the test, the Act had made doing so impossible, barring further state legislation. Since the passage of the Act, while the test has changed over the years, as a selective admissions instrument it has excelled at filling all these schools with diligent, high-achieving students who thrive in college and beyond.

As the years progressed, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech came under occasional assault, and at other times they were praised. During the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, the city actually created four more specialized schools: in 2002 the High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, the High School of American Studies at Lehman College and the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, and later Brooklyn Latin in 2006. Like Stuy, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, these new schools have also only used the SHSAT for admission and have also produced exceptional graduates grateful for the unique environment that objective, meritocratic admissions continue to provide.

Recent Developments, Old Grievances

The SHSAT faced mounting challenges as social justice discourse intensified in the 2010s. When he was elected mayor of New York in 2013, Bill de Blasio pledged to dismantle test-based admissions at the specialized high schools in the name of racial equity. Alumni and parents defended the test as the surest way to keep subjectivity out of admissions and warned that relaxing admissions standards would undermine the schools. Yet public sentiment was turning on these centers of excellence.

In 2018, de Blasio’s efforts to fundamentally reshape the schools came to a head. Just as Mayor Lindsay had imported Scribner, de Blasio brought his own myrmidon, Richard Carranza, to eliminate test-based admissions. Formerly superintendent for the San Francisco Unified School District, Carranza had argued that the admissions test for that city’s most prestigious high school, Lowell High, was racially exclusionary. Under Carranza’s superintendency, Lowell High was made to replace their merit-based admissions with a lottery. Now in New York, de Blasio and Carranza’s plan was to scrap the SHSAT to reconfigure the racial makeup of the specialized schools in favor of Black and Hispanic students.

By the time Carranza was made Chancellor in 2018, although the rates of Black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant were trailing their rates in public schools citywide, the Asian population at Stuyvesant’s population had been growing for years. If the problem were only the historic overrepresentation of white students in the specialized high schools, the growth in the Asian population at Stuyvesant would be an amazing success story! In 1976, white students were 70% of the student body, and Asian students were 16%. By 2018, the numbers had flipped – white students were down to 19%, and Asian students were up to 74%. This change took place as the SHSAT remained the only method of admission, and continued to select for high-achieving, highly passionate students, and the mission was clearly working. These Asian students were largely from immigrant families who sought a fair way for their children to succeed in America. But for de Blasio and Carranza, despite the consistent excellence of Stuyvesant’s graduating classes, the admissions test was irredeemably flawed. If it did not admit Black and Hispanic students at the desired rate, the SHSAT needed to go.

De Blasio and Carranza presented a two-part scheme. The first part was a striking expansion of the Discovery program, a provision written into the Hecht-Calandra Act that permitted students who scored below the SHSAT cutoff to earn admission to a specialized school, so long as they were economically underprivileged and attended a summer institute. Although Hecht-Calandra specifically stipulated that Discovery could not base admissions decisions on race, de Blasio and Carranza projected that an increase in the number of Discovery students from 5% to 20% of each class would bring a corresponding increase of Black and Hispanic students from 9% to 16%.

The second part of the plan was the full dissolution of the SHSAT over the course of three years. In the place of test-based admissions, de Blasio and Carranza proposed that the top 7% of public middle school graduates would automatically gain admission to the specialized high schools. Because of the de facto segregation of New York City’s public middle schools, this approach would push the total proportion of Black and Latino students to an estimated 45%.

Now, a major problem with the dissolution scheme is that the top 7% of performers at many public middle schools still lag far behind the advanced level of students admitted to Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools under the SHSAT. When the plan was being promoted, at almost a fourth of public middle schools there was not a single seventh-grade student who had scored advanced marks on the State Mathematics Exam. If not one student at these schools was proficient at advanced math, how could even the top 7% of them meet the rigorous standards of Stuyvesant, where advanced comprehension in math is necessary for the coursework? Rather than face up to such obvious issues, proponents of the plan preferred just to avert their gaze.

Of course, the mayor also faced another major problem. Under the Hecht-Calandra Act, the second piece of the initiative was straightforwardly illegal: de Blasio and Carranza were trying to eliminate a test that was formally enshrined in state law. Ultimately the state proved unreceptive to de Blasio’s push, and the two-part scheme collapsed into one. Expanding the Discovery program was no longer a part of the solution, but became the whole solution.

In expanding the Discovery program, de Blasio and Carranza wanted to tweak the criteria for financial need so that more Black and Hispanic students were selected than students from other groups, particularly Asians. Carranza wasn’t shy about his motives, even uttering veiled threats against Asian families as when he infamously noted ”I don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools." Many who denigrate Asian representation at Stuyvesant, however, are surprised to learn that Asians consistently rank with Blacks and Hispanics as among the poorest ethnic groups in New York City, and in some years are the poorest demographic of all. The modal Asian student at Stuyvesant is a working-class kid in a family struggling to make ends meet. Yet the mayor’s office considered such students a lower priority; indeed, many Asian New Yorkers were deeply offended by how de Blasio and Carranza unapologetically cast the admissions debate as “a zero-sum race based on race.”

Yet in an ironic twist, de Blasio’s expansion of the Discovery program has had precisely the opposite effect as intended. Most students who have gained entry to the specialized schools under the expanded Discovery have been Asian; in fact, Asian students represent an even higher percentage of Discovery admissions than of admissions by SHSAT scores alone. As it turns out, the demographics of students scoring just below the SHSAT cutoff look very similar to the demographics of those above it. De Blasio and Carranza did not succeed in rebalancing the racial makeup of Stuyvesant and the other specialized schools. All they have done is to admit more kids into advanced classrooms who are struggling to do the work.

Since 1971, admission to the specialized schools has always been based on whether the student reaches the cutoff score on the SHSAT. Traditionally Stuyvesant has the highest cutoff and Brooklyn Latin has the lowest. Accordingly, Stuyvesant maintains the most rigorous standards–standards that can overwhelm even kids who pass the SHSAT, but who pass at lower cutoffs. In 2024, the cutoff for Stuy was 561, while Latin was 492; an SHSAT score that qualifies a student for the workload at Latin does not yet qualify them for the workload at Stuy. But the Discovery Program ignores this limitation altogether, taking kids who scored below a 492 and sending them all the way through to Stuyvesant. Unsurprisingly, these students have suffered.

Stuyvesant’s administration has been coy about releasing data about the Discovery students, but as a teacher I have done my own tracking. While a small number has thrived, the vast majority has struggled—particularly in math and science. This is significant because the more math teachers that are needed to teach students at a lower level, the fewer are available to teach high-level classes like multivariate calculus. From the very beginning, the mission of Stuy has been to offer high-level educational opportunity to any students who can reach it. But when teachers are forced to delay an entire class for the sake of remediating students whom the SHSAT already predicted would struggle to keep pace, we are badly failing this mission. The students best positioned to grasp the opportunities Stuyvesant offers are being held back through no fault of their own. The entire school has faced difficulty because the Discovery students—a full fifth of the class—trail significantly behind. Indeed, many veteran teachers claim that the quality of the student body has degraded significantly since the days when objective SHSAT results alone held sway over admissions decisions.

Especially regrettable is how Discovery has brought back the very specter of racial stigma it was intended to dispel. Prior to its reintroduction, for any Black or Hispanic student enrolled at Stuyvesant, there was no question that he or she had passed the SHSAT just like every other student. Now, however, many students assume that the increasing number of Black and Hispanic students they see have been selected because of demographic parity and not likelihood of success – whether or not this is the case. Many Discovery students are white and Asian students, and yet it is Black and Hispanic students who are facing the stigma. In exploiting the Discovery program to promote racial representation, de Blasio and Carranza reintroduced the discriminatory suspicions that the SHSAT had silenced for decades.

The Torch We Carry

There are better–and fairer–approaches to racial representation at Stuyvesant and its peers than relaxing admissions standards. A simple lack of awareness that the SHSAT exists is an obstacle for many students in New York City schools, and this obstacle is easily overcome simply by administrators and teachers spreading the word to parents and students in the district.

Tragically, one important approach that Black and Hispanic students themselves advocate is regularly demonized by the very education “reformers” who claim to support them. When The New York Times spoke to a collection of Black and Hispanic Stuyvesant students as part of the paper’s non-stop reporting on the school’s demographics, the students emphasized the importance of “expanding gifted and talented classes, which many of them had benefited from, to low-income neighborhoods.” Yet just two years later, their supposed champion de Blasio tried to eliminate gifted and talented programs altogether! The opponents of competitive admissions appear far too busy trying to break down the foundations of excellence in education to listen to what students are actually saying.

De Blasio and his ilk insist that the SHSAT is a problem with public education in New York, but the test comes onto the stage late in a student’s educational trajectory. The SHSAT is a prediction tool used–with reliable success–to identify which students have the combination of intellect and preparation to thrive in an environment of intensive study, accelerated coursework, and demanding expectations. When the test shows that a young student scores below the cutoff, where is the finger-pointing at the failures of schooling and policy to better prepare that student? Test-based admissions policies are far downstream of deeper problems in New York’s elementary and middle schools, yet it is easier for politicians and activists to break the thermometer than to succeed at changing the temperature.

Still, we at Stuyvesant are lucky. Thomas Jefferson, our friend and rival in the DC area just had its admissions policy changed to reduce the number of Asian students. The result is a collapse in academic performance. In San Francisco, the levelers finally got to Lowell during Covid, replacing their merit-based test with a lottery. The city is now trying to return to a merit-based admissions approach, but many parents have already fled the system entirely rather than wait untold years for change.

Despite carrying the weight of the Discovery Program, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the four newer specialized schools carry on like majestic dinosaurs. The SHSAT has consistently produced an amazing student body. What is immediately obvious when meeting these students is the fact that it is the student body itself that makes the school special. It is a constant refrain: “The students make Stuy what it is.”⁹ The faculty is good but not amazing (they need not pass the SHSAT to get hired), and while the building is nice today, the school was in a crumbling heap for decades until 1992 with no ill effects on student achievement. If the “reformers” of the future ever do succeed in dismantling the SHSAT, they will destroy the very thing that made the school great.

What was the vision we at Stuyvesant once championed? That we provide the children to whom we entrust the future every opportunity to learn and excel. Stuyvesant would cultivate competent industrial and scientific minds to serve their city and country, and New York would be better off thanks to their contributions. Yet we have grown lax with the standards to which we hold these students. At the same time that we have loosened our criteria for admission, we have also lowered our expectations for what they can achieve. Public sentiment too often seems to favor selection based on demographic representation, rather than merit. Politicians can call this “justice” all they want, but no one is doing a favor to students by putting them in advanced schools where they simply cannot keep up. Instead, they are only preventing the flourishing of the students who can. The SHSAT asks a great deal of these kids, just as Stuyvesant asks a great deal of them when they arrive. As our students are being tested here, so too are we being tested by a new education policy orthodoxy that wants to throw away everything on which the specialized schools’ stellar records were built. When we start tipping the scales for political reasons, we have entirely lost the plot. When we turn our backs on objective measures of merit, we turn our backs on excellence itself.

1. Editorial, The New York Times, April 8, 1941, p. 24.

2. All this information comes from a series of New York Times articles from the spring of 1941.

3. Leonard Buder, “Demands for Local Control Grow,” The New York Times, January 12, 1968.

4. M.S. Handler, “Bronx High School of Science Accused of Bias in Admissions,” The New York Times, January 22, 1971.

5. Andrew H. Malcolm, “Scribner to Name Unit to Study Special-School Entrance Tests,” The New York Times, February 24, 1971, p. 50.

6. Leonard Buder, “Board Asks Defeat of a Bill Retaining 4 Specialized Schools’ Entrance Tests,” The New York Times, May 17, 1971, p. 26.

7. Editorial, “Petrifying the High Schools?” The New York Times, May 21, 1971, p. 38.

8. Text of the Hecht-Calandra Bill Amending Section 2590G, Subdivision 12 of the Education Law, Section (b).

9. Alec Klein, A Class Apart (Simon & Schuster, 2007), 25.